Early Indications That Summary Would Be Primarily Pastoral in Nature

By Patsy McGarry
Irish Times
March 21, 2012

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0321/1224313641992.html

Seminarians in Maynooth where Cardinal Brady emphasised at the press conference in the college that the purpose of the unprecedented visitation to the Irish Catholic Church was primarily "pastoral in nature".

ANALYSIS: The report amounted to a fleshing out of the pope’s analysis in his letter to the Irish faithful, writes PATSY McGARRY

A PARTICULARLY informed Catholic has described the Summary of the Findings of the Apostolic Visitation in Ireland, published yesterday, as "a damp squid".

He said so by text yesterday afternoon. In so far as all squids are the same, being damp, the man's point was all the more accurate even if what he said was a malapropism.

There was an undoubted sense of sameness, and accompanying disappointment, at the content of the 7½ page summary of reports on the Irish church prepared for the Vatican by some of its heavy hitters in last year's visitation.

This "damp squid" reaction would seem to have been anticipated by the church leadership in Ireland as Cardinal Brady emphasised at the press conference in Maynooth that the purpose of the unprecedented visitation to the Irish Catholic Church was primarily "pastoral in nature". The pope's intention was that "it should assist the local church on he path of renewal," he said. Expectations, however, were so much greater than that.

The now usual, if still welcome, expressions of shame and remorse as well as firm purposes of amendment were repeated by the Irish church leadership. When it came to concrete steps towards radical change in the culture of clercalism which was at the root of so much cover-up of child sex abuse by church authorities in Ireland, there was little. Rather, what was presented seemed more like retrenchment and withdrawal than a radical reaching out.

That there were such high expectations in the first place was probably, in part at least, rooted in that unquenchable hope still harboured by those children of the spirit of Vatican II who, despite everything, continue to believe their day will come.

More significantly, however, and what gave expectations in this context such legs was the very fact that the visitation to the Irish church was announced by Pope Benedict in his, also unprecedented, pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, published two years ago yesterday.

Then the visitation teams, when announced, were impressive. Their leaders included church heavy-hitters such as then archbishop of New York, president of the the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and now Cardinal Timothy Dolan; Cardinal Seán O'Malley Archbishop of Boston; the former archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor; the Archbishop of Toronto, now Cardinal Thomas Collins and the Archbishop of Ottawa Terence Prendergast.

But those who had high expectations may really have only themselves to blame. They ought to have paid more attention to those other paragraphs in the pope's letter of two years ago.

They would have noticed there what his expectations were. He commented there how in recent decades in the Irish church "the sacramental and devotional practices that sustain faith and enable it to grow, such as frequent confession, daily prayer and annual retreats, were neglected. Significant too was the tendency during this period, also on the part of priests and religious, to adopt ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel."

He said: "The programme of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted and indeed, in the light of the profound social changes that were taking place, it was far from easy to know how best to implement it.

"In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations."

Among contributing factors to the abuse scandal, he said, were "inadequate procedures for determining the suitability of candidates for the priesthood and the religious life; insufficient human, moral, intellectual and spiritual formation in seminaries and novitiates . . ."

What we got yesterday was a fleshing out of the pope's analysis. Should anyone, really, have expected anything more?